How popular is decoupled Drupal?

Decoupled Drupal has been an increasingly visible topic at Drupal events and on the web for several years now. But what is the percentage of decoupled Drupal sites out of all Drupal sites?

Unfortunately there is no way to get hard numbers at the moment. It also looks as if there have been no user surveys about decoupled Drupal usage so far.

One way to estimate the number of decoupled sites is to look at the usage statistics of modules commonly used on decoupled sites. So I thought I would do that.

(All figures are from 15 April 2018.)

Number of Drupal sites:

• Drupal 8: 226,908 sites
• Drupal 7: 895,343 sites
• Drupal 8 and 7 total: 1,122,251 sites.

To get a better overall picture let’s first look at the the most popular modules:

The difference between the most popular module on Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 is huge! This is probably because Drupal 8 core provides much more functionality out of the box.

Now let’s look at the modules used for decoupled Drupal. For Drupal 8 I have selected the REST UI module and for Drupal 7 the Services module:

• Drupal 8: REST UI, installed on 8,404 sites (3.7 % of all Drupal 8 sites)
• Drupal 7: Services, installed on 43,081 sites (4.8 % of all Drupal 7 sites)
• Drupal 8 and 7: REST UI + Services, installed on 51,485 sites (4.6 % of all Drupal 8 and 7 sites).

Finally let’s look at graphs of usage over time, starting with Services: